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2014 Global Drupal 8 Sprint Weekend- Meet the Sprinters

The weekend of January 25 was the 2014 Global Sprint for Drupal 8 and at Genuine Interactive in Boston, we had over 40 people get together to contribute to the Drupal community and help prepare Drupal 8 for beta release. Running off of Genuine's espresso machine (which uses Linux), I helped with what I could in terms of documentation and other grammatical reviews that needed attention for Drupal Core.

With it being my first sprint, I was really excited to meet the sprinters and really understand why they are involved with Drupal. Here are a few sprinters I interviewed from this weekend!

Mike Miles, Associate Director of PHP, Genuine Interactive

Tell me about your first experience with Drupal

My first Drupal experience was in 2008 when I first started tooling around with it. I was looking to use it for the company I used to work for, before coming to Genuine.

What is your favorite Drupal memory?

My favorite Drupal memory was the the first module I contributed. It was the Yelp module and I was just really excited to give back to the community and see that people downloaded and used it.

What will you be working on at the Global Sprint?

In the Drupal 8 Sprint, I’ll be working on search-related tickets, but I’m really just trying to help out where I can.

What are you most excited about in Drupal 8?

I’m most excited about the move over to Symfony 2 because I think it’ll make Drupal 8 more robust and make it integrate better with the PHP community.

What is something that may be underrated about Drupal?

I think that the community involvement aspect of Drupal is underrated. People don’t understand how important the Drupal community is to the success of Drupal.

Where would you like to see Drupal in the future?

My biggest hope for Drupal is that it becomes more widely adopted. I think today it powers 2% of all websites, and I’d like that number and adoption rate to increase exponentially.

Nick Veenhof, Senior Search Engineer, Acquia

Tell me about your first experience with Drupal

My first Drupal experience was when I was getting my bachelor’s degree in Belgium and I was asked to do a community project with Drupal for the school.

What is your favorite Drupal memory?

My favorite Drupal memory was when I was first interviewing for jobs after school and found a job with Drupal in Belgium. Days after I was hired, we flew to Hungary where I went to my first Drupalcon, so that was pretty incredible.

What will you be working on at the Global Sprint?

I’ll be working on Drupal 8 Search core so we can then focus on the merge of Search API and Apache Solr.

What are you most excited about in Drupal 8?

I’m most excited about the initiative that Thomas Seidl and I are taking to merge Search API and Apache Solr because it will be the best of both worlds. Users won’t have to choose from two different modules and will be able to leverage this combination to do great things.

What is something that may be underrated about Drupal?

I think the most underrated part about Drupal is RDF. Semantic data is going to be crucial is even more so than what people think and the possibilities that search and RDF bring together are unimaginable.

What is the future of Drupal, where do you see it in the future?

My wish for Drupal is that it continues to be successful for the mid to large enterprises but also to be just as helpful and important for smaller businesses. Also, the mobile initiative Dries took a few years ago is really paying off, so our next big step is doing everything mobile.

John Eckman, Managing Director, ISITE Design

Tell me about your first experience with Drupal

At my previous job, I used Drupal to do some client work and then created some internal training materials with it for other employees.

What is your favorite Drupal memory?

Probably attending my first Drupalcon in Boston in 2008. I had just recently started using Drupal, so it was great seeing how passionate the community was first-hand.

What will you be working on at the Global Sprint?
I'll be working on some issues in the migrate project. The IMP core initiative is to get migrate in core with the hopes of using the migrate module as opposed to updating hooks, etc.

What are you most excited about in Drupal 8?

Probably the whiskey initiative, which will make it easier to move config around. This had been traditionally difficult with larger teams working on Drupal, so this will be big. But I also think the Symfony integration is smart and the improved authoring experience in Drupal 8 will be really important.

What is something that may be underrated about Drupal?

The community's sense of humor for sure. I've always appreciated it. Take the module, bad judgement for example. The description of it said, "the use of the module requires bad judgement." Another module was a pants status module, and this just showed how to build a module with a sense of humor and that everything isn't so serious and dull.

What is the future of Drupal, where do you see it in the future?

I'd like to see the community continue to grow, but the biggest challenge for Drupal is that it needs to have a better onramp procedure. Right now, the first step is so high to get started, but when the first step is easier to take, that's when the adoption rate will grow and Drupal will be more effective as a platform to help brands deliver great content.

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